Uber has discontinued its Apple Watch app, telling customers to change to its cellular app as an alternative. No extra hailing an Uber journey out of your wrist.
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Has Uber discontinued its Apple Watch app?
“Please swap to the Consumer cellular app,” reads a grammatically incorrect message that greets the consumer after they open Uber for Apple Watch. “We not supporting the Apple Watch app. Sorry for the inconvenience,” it continues.
It seems the app has been unavailable to obtain since round December 8. Furthermore, Uber for Apple Watch can be presently accessible to obtain from Apple’s App Retailer, however that is most likely as a result of server modifications taking a while to propagate.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Curiously, Uber has not eliminated the Uber Apple Watch app from the App Retailer. The app continues to be capable of be downloaded and put in on an Apple Watch, however opening it up reveals a poorly-worded message about dropped assist, ending with a tragic face emoji.
On the time of writing, Uber didn’t replace its assist website to mirror the change.
Why are some builders discontinuing Apple Watch apps?
Uber is simply the most recent main developer to drop assist for Apple’s smartwatch.
Prior to now a number of years, main apps have stopped supporting Apple Watch with native apps. Among the standard apps that was accessible on the wrist-worn system however now solely supply assist for notifications embrace eBay, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Twitter and Instagram. Learn: What’s the Dock on my Apple Watch? How does it work?
In many of the circumstances, builders mentioned they noticed little exercise from their watchOS apps. Many app makers merely couldn’t afford to assist Apple Watch whereas others have did not optimize their apps correctly for wrist computing. Restricted performance might be the rationale for the elimination of Uber for Apple Watch—the watchOS app by no means supported Uber options similar to uberPOOL, ETA sharing or contacting a driver.
However there are additionally circumstances when a developer has pulled their Apple Watch app as a result of it was both outdated or used outdated APIs that Apple would quickly cease supporting.
One such case is the Google Maps app, which was unavailable on the wearable system for a interval till Google rewrote it from scratch to run natively on the watch.
